Filmmakers Take A Stand: Human Rights Watch ‘98

Co-presented with the Margaret Mead Festival are two strong documents on black life in America, past and present. "Inside Bedford Stuyvesant" is a 1968 WNET-TV production dedicated to positive images of Black Americans. More intriguing than Harry Belafonte getting questioned by black power youths is a memorable segment where a Le Roi Jones Youth Theater group performs a poem of penetrating racial injustice. Thirty years later, "Melvin Van Peebles' Classified X" shows us how necessary a show like "Inside Bed-Stuy" was -- his first person account of African Americans in Hollywood is a revealing look at the subtle and not-so subtle discrimination against blacks throughout media history.

The plight of Japanese-Americans will also be covered in a number of documentaries, most notably the moving "Beyond Barbed Wire", a skillfully level-headed doc that balances stories of the Japanese-Americans that were held in American internment camps with the soldiers who left their parents behind the barbed wire to prove that they could die and die harder for their country, than anyone else. Playing with "Wire" is the winner of the 1997 Academy Award for Short Film, "Visas and Virtue," a amateurishly executed, tear-jerker about the Japanese equivalent of Oscar Schindler who issued some 2,000 exit visas to Jews during World War II. The film is a lesson in Academy sentimentality like no other.

Among the powerful pics promoting women's rights are a distinctly Indian epic "Death Sentence"; "The Murmuring," a documentary on female survivors of Korean brothels from World War II, and Ellen Bruno's hard-hitting "Sacrifice," a nightmarish vision of Burmese girls sold into Thai slavery and prostitution.

Totalitarianism, politics and prejudice form another triptych of intersecting themes in a collection of Slavic films. Stalinism gets its due in two pics, the eye-opening Meryl Streep-narrated "Eternal Memory: Voices from the Great Terror" and "Boy Hero 001," about a 12 year-old who became a Stalinist national hero for turning his father into the secret police. From the Czech Republic comes one of the more subtly and deftly directed narrative films in the festival, Petr Vaclav's "Marian" about a young Romany (gypsy) boy ‘rehabilitated' by an abusive institutional system.

This year's Nestor Almendros award, named for the esteemed cinematographer, went to the Russian doc "Ordinary President," a wry and penetrating look at Byelorussian politics and its Hitler-inspired despot, President Alexander Lukaschenka. The filmmaker, Yuri Khashchevatsky, who was severely beaten after the doc aired on French Television, will receive a cash prize of $5,000. "We think it's really important to try to give something to a filmmaker so they can work on their next project," says Burres. The prize winner is gauged by "weighing the subject of the film, the artistic merit of the film and what the filmmaker has had to persevere to complete the film." Burres singled out "President" for "incorporating humor so well, a wonderful gift with Human Rights films." Another winner, the more widely-known Barbara Kopple will receive the 4th annual Irene Diamond Lifetime Achievement Award for her "unparalleled leadership in introducing mainstream audiences to controversial human rights issues."

"These kinds of films are no longer pigeon-holed as political films," says Burres, noting the number of other film festivals where their films have screened and the worldwide scale of their program. "This cinema has become very much world cinema. Human rights and political filmmaking is getting more mainstream," explains Burres.

Burres and Associate Director, Heather Harding, selected the films from several sources: a call for submissions, festival outreach at Toronto, Rotterdam and Berlin as well as working with human rights activists to find out who in the field is working on important issues. "We've gotten [more] submissions in the past two years than ever before," says Burres, noting the high number of dramatic films as well as feature-length documentaries, and the rising tide of video work. "People have really honed the skills of videomaking and we're getting a lot of very strong videos. They're making it in video and then transferring it to 35mm to get a stronger theatrical showing if they can, but realizing that they can make it originally on digital video or beta and that the quality is really strong."

One of the outcomes of the Film Festival is an inspiring organization that all filmmakers should become aware of called FilmWatch: "It started with an arm of Human Rights Watch called the Fund for Free Expression," explain Burres. "It was put together by Hannah Pakula, and the Fund for Free Expression and the Film Festival, to gather filmmakers, especially American directors, to sign their name and be able to be visible when a filmmaker or film is censored anywhere in the world." For Mr. Suh Joon-sik, the director of the Korean Humans Rights Film Festival, who was arrested and jailed last year for screening a controversial video documentary, a Film Watch writing campaign was instrumental in getting Mr. Suh released on bail earlier this year. "We thought it was really important that film and videomakers begin to get support," says Burres. "We thought it was important that filmmakers take a stand."